The main reason why online ads are often poorly targeted

byBEX Media

One of the reasons FB is often quite bad at targeting is because it places people into groups (eg. Female, 35-55, US, interest in fashion) and relies on information that people share about themselves on their profiles. Some people may have insufficient, inaccurate or old information on their profiles and the pages they liked many years ago are no longer a relevant representation of their interests anymore. So, when you target people for your ad on Facebook, you rely on this user information.

Facebook doesn’t REALLY know its users

If you have ever advertised on Facebook you probably know how bad their targeting is, both from the advertisers’ perspective as well as the audience’s.

90 percent of people placing ads “think” that they have done a great job at targeting the right audience on Facebook. Truth be told, they are just skimming the surface and their ads are quite poorly targeted. Because of that, they spend way too much money and don’t get the results they had hoped for. The second reason why Facebook’s targeting is bad is that it places people into groups and relies on information that people disclose about themselves in their profiles as well as through pages they share and content they share. For all the obvious reasons, this is all pretty unreliable. In other words, when advertisers target the audiences for an ad, they rely on faulty or inaccurate user information.

If advertisers wish to actually optimize their campaign spending and performance through consumer targeting, they should look elsewhere. Google, for instance, actually knows a lot more about the consumer because it’s relying on actual information; they track what people actually search, the videos they watch, the pages they visit, the things they buy etc. In short, Google targets users by their actions, not by the information they (or others) disclose about themselves. There is just one problem with that: when a consumer is looking up information about a product online and then buys it in a webshop, Google’s knowledge of that persons need for that certain product is already outdated. After someone researched electrical lawn mowers on Google and ordered one on Amazon, there’s simply no use in bombarding him/her with ads for lawn mowers – but that’s exactly what Google Ads does.

Knowing a consumer takes more than that

All the big data out there can be of great value, but only if you know what to do with it. Based on their insight into Facebook’s, Google’s and other big players’ deficiency when it comes to truly knowing the consumers, a team of experts in the fields of psychology, data analysis, AI and marketing has come up with an elaborate system, called BehaviourExchange, that enables websites to customize their content in real time to each individual visitor. That way, they hope to eliminate the problem of ad blindness and help B2C businesses reach their target customers and optimize marketing costs.

In addition to presenting a powerful tool to marketers, advertisers, publishers, and businesses, BehaviourExchange focuses on the overall user experience. They believe that by showing users only the content they’re interested in they help them have the best possible online experience and largely free them of irrelevant content and ads. Find out more about BehaviourExchnage!

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The BehaviourExchange team of experts in artificial intelligence, machine learning, psychology, online content and online marketing is working hard to make the (online) world a better place. For businesses, as well as for individual users.

The goal of smart cities in smart communities is to offer new, innovative intelligent services to members of the community through more effective interaction with them and effective responses to their needs. The IOP2017 platform will enable user profiling in user application within intelligent cities, which will be provided in real time